Jesus is for everybody

This Sunday is Epiphany Sunday. I don't use the word "epiphany" often because it is obscure to most people. It means "revealing," and it is an important part of your Christmas observance. The season is not over until we have Epiphany. The story is in Matthew 2:1-12.

The "revealing" is of Jesus to the Wise Men, or Magi, who seek him out. These visitors are not Jews. They are foreign magicians or astrologers. They have been tipped off to an extraordinary cosmic event, and they travel great distance to see it for themselves. Their importance to the story is that they are outsiders. God is revealing something to outsiders.

God's revelation, which came to the insiders, is also for the outsiders. Jesus is for everybody! It is a simple idea but try living by it. You quickly find that churches are usually communities of insiders. It is nice to be an insider, and once you are, you tend to hold on to it for yourself. Churches are largely ineffective because they behave like insiders, and have forgotten how to welcome people from outside the circle. Being an insider will turn your faith very flat.

The arrival of this Jesus-who-is-for-everybody brought consequences. King Herod responded to the search of the Magi by killing all the babies in Bethlehem to make sure of eliminating the little one who might be a threat to his own position. To escape Herod's wrath the family of baby Jesus fled to Egypt, living there as aliens. Jesus is a threat to insiders everywhere.

For much of the last 1,500 years of Western culture the Christian church has had insider status. The USA thought of itself as a Christian country. Our churches, Protestant and Catholic, were sanctioned and blessed by secular culture (as long as we did not mess with it too much). We are no longer in that position. Churches are in staggering decline in membership, atttendance, and financial strength. An entire generation is finding no meaning at all in traditional religious practice. Megachurches notwithstanding, the church cannot be called a prominent force in American culture anymore. This relatively new development (unfolding over the last fifty years) has left us insiders grasping for identity and purpose.

The message of Jesus remains powerful even as the church weakens. What has happened? It is the first century all over again. We are now aliens, not insiders. We are like Jesus' family, living as immigrants in a culture that is not ours. We can lament, or we can realize that this is how God really operates. Living as aliens in this culture, we can reach out in God's unfathomable love to all people without regard for privilege, status, or power.

Epiphany is a good time to be reminded that we are a Jesus-is-for-everybody people. The gospel is not a national, racial, ethnic, social, economic, or ideological thing. God's revelation of Jesus to "the Gentiles" is a sign of radical love and inclusion of all people everywhere. Anything we do that does not show that is a failure of Christmas spirit.